Like I’ve said before, my three main job duties involve Oracle, Linux and VMware. This also tends to extend to the hardware this all runs on. I sometimes need to open support tickets on these products and recently had two support experiences I wish to share. In both cases, my initial support request didn’t get the attention it needed, but in both cases, support managers went above and beyond to give my client and I exemplary support.
In these days of off-shoring, near-shoring, and other other cost avoidance initiatives, I’m reminded that it’s the performance of support individuals who deal with end users that most greatly influence customer opinions.
The first experience involves EMC support with our SAN. We’ve recently expanded our primary server room. Part of that expansion involved adding additional UPS resources and an UPS bypass. For awhile, we were running our SAN on non-redundant power. When we provided redundant power, one of the power supplies in our SAN failed and I opened a support ticket with EMC. Somehow the ticket didn’t get routed or assigned correctly and even after placing two additional support calls, here I was two days in and still with a failed power supply. Not a comfortable feeling. At that point I reached out to our sales rep (Bryan Coston of PBS Now) at the end of business day who in turn reached out to EMC’s area support representative ( Scott Marnell). Even though I hadn’t even contacted them till close of business, I received calls and emails from them that night and had the option to get the defective part replaced that night. It’s that sort of above the call of duty support that makes me very happy to have EMC products in my environment. These two individuals (and perhaps others behind the scenes) in a couple of hours turned around an unpleasant support situation into a support success. Thank you PBSNOW and EMC.
The second support experience involves Oracle Support with Oracle Agile software. I’m currently migrating our Agile system to the latest versions in a test environment. I’ve run into some issues I’ve been unable to resolve on my own, and opened a couple of technical support tickets with Oracle. Both tickets ended up being assigned to same analyst. On one ticket involving data migration errors, I received no updates for a whole week. On the other ticket, the analyst and I got into a disagreement regarding Oracle’s support of EXPort and IMPort utilities with Oracle Database 11g. After getting frustrated and not receiving any updates to either issue, including my written request that the requests by duty managed, I called in and requested a call from a duty manager. Within an hour I had the duty manager on the phone. Not only did he apologize for the delays and reassign my support tickets to a senior level support analyst, the duty manager (I’m sorry, I didn’t write down his name) also spoke with me at length regarding my experiences with the upgrade and asking specific questions on what could be done to make the upgrade documentation and experience better. I’ll be posting my experiences and notes from the upgrade once it’s complete. The analyst that the duty manager assigned to my tickets, Mehdi Hamzezadeh, was fantastic. Not only did he take ownership of my support tickets and resolved both issues in a matter of hours, it turns out he wrote many of the data cleanup scripts that Oracle Support provides to their end customers. I’ve very grateful to the duty manager for assigning Medhi to my tickets and to Medhi for his quick and complete assistance.